Hi, Daniel.
Well, that changes our original natural assumption that this was a
late-model plain-vanilla box! That's a fairly complex system you have
there: dual processors; upgraded from NT OS; hand-me-down with SCSI -
Maybe?! Does that matter? You'd better believe it does!
First, have you run Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy or other such
programs? Recently? Are you using a firewall and antivirus software, and
keeping it updated? Since you said that "it was running smooth" until
recently, it sounds like somebody (maybe one of those other users?) may have
downloaded and installed some malware, intentionally or not. A good
malware/virus cleanup might solve your whole problem. If not, read on...
Your best bet would probably be to start over because you have no idea what
may be hidden under layers of updates. If you have little or no
irreplaceable data, put your WinXP CD-ROM in the drive and reboot from that
CD. Let Setup delete all partitions on your first physical HD and create a
new partition there and format it NTFS. Then let Setup install WinXP from
scratch. Later, you can use Disk Management for any partitioning and
formatting tasks on your second HD.
If you have been running this computer for a while since "inheriting" it,
you probably have installed applications and stored data on it. If that is
the case, then you might want to read Microsoft's instructions for how to do
an "in-place upgrade"; see this KB article:
How to perform an in-place upgrade (reinstallation) of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q315341
This will take as long as a clean install (without reformatting) of WinXP
itself, but will preserve your installed apps and data.
In EITHER case - clean install or in-place update - you will need to get
your firewall and antivirus working again, then go online to Windows Update
to be sure you have the latest Service Pack and later fixes. With the
install or update (an hour or two) and the Windows Updates (another hour or
two), set aside half a day for the project.
BEFORE you start, though, you need to learn more about your computer,
especially your hard drives and their interface! You definitely need to
know if it is SCSI, and which SCSI host adapter it uses. If the boot device
is SCSI, you will most likely need to have drivers for the host adapter on a
floppy diskette before you begin; when invited by Setup, press F6 and wait
for instructions for how to install the drivers from that floppy. Even
though the drivers were previously installed, obviously (since you can boot
and run now), they might need to be installed from floppy again when Setup
runs again.
My own system has 3 HDs: 1 SCSI and 2 IDE on a RAID controller (but not
using RAID). It takes about 3 minutes to get to the desktop and another
minute or two before I can start to run applications. Slow, of course, is a
subjective term. Many users would consider my 5 minutes slow. Thirty
minutes is slow to me!
From your post, it sounds as though your delay is AFTER WinXP starts, not in
the BIOS or loading-Windows phase. So start with msconfig and with the
malware scans.
RC
